Tuesday, August 20, 2013

The Stunningly Rapid Rise of the National Security State. This Shit is Beginning to Get Scary.

Big news on the Orwellian Front. The ascendancy of the national security state is picking up steam and it's spreading into the upper echelons of the media.

First up, The Guardian. The venerable newspaper reports receiving an ominous demand from the "centre" of the Cameron government to cough up any documents it received from whistleblower Edward Snowden. The editors responded by destroying every hard drive in their possession containing any Snowden documents.

The decision was taken after a threat of legal action by the
government that could have stopped reporting on the extent of American
and British government surveillance revealed by the documents.

It
resulted in one of the stranger episodes in the history of digital-age
journalism. On Saturday 20 July, in a deserted basement of the Guardian's
King's Cross offices, a senior editor and a Guardian computer expert
used angle grinders and other tools to pulverise the hard drives and
memory chips on which the encrypted files had been stored.

Job done?

As they worked they were watched by technicians from Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) who took notes and photographs, but who left empty-handed.

The
editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, had earlier informed
government officials that other copies of the files existed outside the
country and that the Guardian was neither the sole recipient nor steward
of the files leaked by Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor. But the government insisted that the material be either destroyed or surrendered.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, it's turning into Journalism's War on Journalism. Here it's Time magazine's senior national correspondent, Michael Grunwald, going on Twitter to announce how he "can’t wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange."

From David Sirota in Salon.com:

it is yet more proof of the growing ranks of Journalists Against Journalism Club.
Yes, here we have a reporter expressing excitement at the prospect of
the government executing the publisher of information that became the
basis for some of the most important journalism in the last decade.

Likewise, it is yet more proof that the nonchalant blood lust that pervades the National Security State
also exists inside the establishment media that is supposed to be
objectively covering that National Security State. Indeed, even after
deleting his tweet, Grunwald was unrepentant about such blood lust,
saying that he wasn’t sorry for effectively endorsing extrajudicial
assassination, but merely for the fact that his tweet “gives Assange
supporters a nice safe persecution complex to hide in.”

But, then,
journalists hating on journalism and political reporters worshiping
state-sponsored violence is no big reveal anymore. In that sense,
Grunwald’s morbid fantasy is notable primarily because it summarized
such realities in such uncharacteristically clear terms.

What is
more revelatory is what the context of the Grunwald episode says about
the intensifying debate over who is and who is not a true “journalist,”
and whether it is opinion or ideology that really disqualifies one from
the legal privileges that are supposed to come with that label.

The
journalist/non-journalist is a debate that has gone on for a while now.
It is one that I have a bit of personal experience with since a 2007 fight
when the gatekeepers in the congressional press gallery tried to deny
me press credentials simply because I acknowledge my own political
opinions/ideology. And it is a debate that has now flared back up since
opinionated Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald began breaking the NSA
stories back in June.

6 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Nicely played Mr. Rusbridger. There are probably thousands of copies of Snowden's documentation scattered throughout the world. But if your government wants to play intimidation games with you, then simply don't play.

And what's with the photo? No riding crop? Ever Nazi man-about-town has a riding crop these days.